The Ghost in the Garden

 At Christmas I was given a book that I had never heard of, and which turned out to be, for most of its length, a fascinating and absorbing read. The Ghost in the Garden by Jude Piesse is about Charles Darwin's childhood garden at The Mount, the family home in Shrewsbury, a garden of which only tantalising traces remain today. This garden, memories of it and impressions and ideas derived from it, followed the great naturalist through his life, Piesse argues. It was a kind of lost paradise, where he collected bird's eggs and pebbles, climbed trees, learned about flowers and insects and pigeons, and fished in the Severn, and it was also, with its ample evidence of the interconnectedness of all things in nature, a seedbed of Darwin's interests and theories. It was in his mind throughout the Beagle expeditions, as evidenced by letters to his sister, and when he created his new garden at Down House in Kent. It was at his childhood home that he wrote, in 1842, the first outline of his theory of how evolution worked. 'Darwin's childhood garden is not just Darwin's after all,' writes Piesse. 'It is a tangle of experiences that both shaped and exceeded him; a hatchway of interconnecting pathways – both man-made and natural – that lead into the future and back to the past.'
  Jude Piesse gives a vivid account of her explorations and researches, building a rounded picture of the life of the garden and of the young Darwin. All this is told in parallel to her return to Shrewsbury, her home town, her feelings for it, and, in particular, her new life as a mother – just the kind of thing that usually puts me off a book of this kind, but here it worked wonders. The author's rediscovery of a child's-eye view of the world through her own children's experience chimed perfectly with her exploration of the young Darwin's own discovery of the natural world around him. The weakness of the book is that, like so many, it is too long, so that towards the end Piesse seems to be following some pretty tenuous threads and bulking out her material. This is a shame, as the book as a whole does a great job in bringing Darwin's childhood garden to the fore as a hugely important influence in his life and work, and it does so in an imaginative and original manner. At three quarters of the length, it would have done the job even better.